


Sorrow Waited

by f0xh0undvix3n



Category: Fate/Zero, Fate/stay night (Visual Novel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 22:37:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2749694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/f0xh0undvix3n/pseuds/f0xh0undvix3n
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is mid-1989, and Kirei Kotomine is desperate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorrow Waited

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, surprisingly I'm still around. I wrote this at 2am last night when I couldn't sleep, so please forgive any accidental tense changes and whether or not the dates line up exactly.

It is mid-1989, and Kirei Kotomine is desperate.

It isn't time which he is running low on, but patience. No road seems to lead to salvation and all his fervent prayer yields no answer. And in all of it, he feels next to nothing. There is no sense of 'loss', because what is missing is something he never had from the beginning. Is there anguish to be felt in being an incomplete human, he wonders? If there is, perhaps that is all he holds within himself.

There is one method and one method only which remains to him: the idyllic family life in which any virtuous individual would find joy. Strangely, such a thing fails to occur to him until a woman--frail, bandaged, and an unfamiliar face in his father's congregation--passes by him on one Sunday afternoon.

Risei tells him the woman's name is Claudia Ortensia; he explains that she rarely attends church due to some debilitating illness.

...And somehow, Kirei decides this to be the perfect solution.

☆

It is three weeks to the day after Risei tells his son about the pale woman named for white flowers. Much to the surprise of both father and son, she returns to the church on the hill relatively soon. As she stands to leave, frail legs falter and she stumbles against the young Executor who catches her without thinking.

...In the years that followed, Claudia never once confesses that she had felt quite well that day, or that in between apologies she had spoken the one lie she ever told Kirei--an excuse about feeling lightheaded.

☆

Only a month later does he confess to holding nothing within himself. He tells her that 'Kirei Kotomine' is a void, empty existence with no self to speak of. That he feels neither love nor hatred, neither happiness nor misery, and holds no value in that which anyone should consider 'beautiful'.

She listens in attentive silence with porcelain hands folded in her lap, single uncovered eye watching every motion he makes. When he at last falls silent, she takes slow, ragged breaths and beckons him closer with a small gesture of one hand. He knows even simply moving is agonizing for her on some days, so he leans over to accommodate and finds slender arms around his neck, thin fingers threading through disheveled brown hair.

She tells him 'I love you' in a light voice like windchimes in a faint breeze.

He says nothing.

☆ 

They're married in the church on the hill in spring 1990. Her smile is bright and heartfelt; Kirei wonders if he's smiling as well, or if he's even able to.

On that day, he first realizes her hair is the color of starlight. But what that phrases sounded like and what it meant were very different things. When Kirei thinks it resembles starlight, the reasoning attached to that is simple.

Starlight was unreachable and unattainable. Cold silver remnants of an existence that may well have already been extinguished. Claudia Ortensia stands beside him--smiling, living, and breathing--and yet her fate is already certain. That smile is the spark of something Kirei could never reach, something already dead and yet continuing to linger.

☆

Just under a year later, Claudia risks her life to bear a child, and it seemed almost miraculous that both she and their daughter even survive. For what must be no more than half a second, Kirei catches himself thinking it may be easier if his wife dies in the process and thus ends her own suffering.

Their child looks exactly like her mother. Claudia names the girl Caren--it means 'pure', similar to her father's name. Kirei wonders if Claudia gives her that name with the same hope Risei had held for his child in winter 1967. Of course she did, he decided without bothering to ask. Any parent should hope that their child would be pure and virtuous.

It is January of 1991, and even with a loving wife and child Kirei Kotomine is no closer to fulfillment.

Claudia Ortensia has at most a year left to live.

☆

It doesn't work. 

He tries so desperately to love her, and it doesn't work. He curses the immense waste of time that his experiment has been, but the conclusion is what it is. Claudia grows weaker and more like a corpse in appearance by the day--he has run out of time and out of patience.

His existence has been a mistake. Someone incapable of even so much as love is a life too wretched and worthless to be allowed, and so he decides to fix the contradiction. Overdose seems the easiest method; no bloodstains left for Kirei's father to concern himself with.

But first, there remains one single loose end which brings him to the dying woman's side. There is no other who understands his pain or how he fought his own nature trying to love her. As he struggled in vain, so did she in her efforts to fill the blank void named Kirei Kotomine and grant his salvation. No matter his flaw or defect, Claudia Ortensia had been a saint that had loved him from the first moment in his father's church.

'I could not love you.'

And so he informs the woman upon her deathbed of his conclusion. There is no regret in his voice as he states the fact that he realizes had been determined at the very beginning.

She smiles and struggles to raise a hand to his face--her skin already has the faint chill of death to it, he notes in the back of his mind. He wonders if she can even speak, being so far gone.

The last of her strength comes with a sudden motion of her other hand, a flash of silver in a darkened room. By the time he fully comprehends what she's doing, the knife has already been driven into her own chest.

"No...you do love me."

He doesn't speak--is it out of shock? Can he even feel shocked? In an instant, Kirei is made keenly aware of the depths of this woman's devotion. As their entire marriage had been a gamble on his part...so was this act the final hope of Claudia Ortensia.

This is her attempt to make him feel grief and regret. Not out of malice, but because she truly understood that feeling even that would be a blessing for the void existence she had loved.

"See? You're crying..."

Those are the last words spoken between them. He remains in place for an unknown amount of time--minutes or hours, there is no way to know--with wayward drops of that woman's blood on his face.

It is truly a waste, he thinks, slowly looking to his own hands.

_If she was going to die, I wanted to be the one to kill her._

That is the last thought of one who had sought salvation. No such thing can be found for him now. Not even death can rectify the mistake of his existence now; pursuing that solution would take the death of one so desperate to prove he should live and render it meaningless.

☆

Spring, 1992. Claudia's grave rests behind Kotomine Church; at the funeral a small girl with white hair grasps Kirei's right hand tightly. He finds the back of his left hand aches terribly, but doesn't linger on the thought.

☆

He meets Tokiomi Tohsaka in Italy less than a week after the funeral, told he's been chosen for some greater purpose to help him seek a holy artifact. There seems no point, and yet Kirei knows he has no other option but to descend into insanity.

Less than an hour later, he throws his wedding ring into the river. Already he's made himself forget that woman's face, and her name is barely a distant memory.

☆

He dies in winter 2005--not for the first time, but definitely for the last. Even now, the priest can't say that he cares. The conclusion is what it is.

 _This is how it_   _ends_ , he says, and of course it's the truth.  _A simple difference in time._

 _Yeah, this is for hurting me so much,_ comes the defiant answer _. I'm going to mercilessly destroy your wish._

Years later, he doesn't remember anything about her except two sentences spoken in a weak and ragged voice. There's no regret to be felt, nothing to mourn the loss of.

In the end he is an existence designated 'evil', whether he likes that fact or not. 'Evil' is destined to be destroyed by a force for 'good', so this ending was right. He has no objections, even if anyone else would be devastated or enraged to see the work of over a decade made pointless.

_'See? You're crying.'_

And in his final moment, all he can think to do is smile about it.


End file.
